Last week’s flurry of AI-based publishing stories—from Microsoft to Spines—left many of us somewhat breathless. Maybe it’s a sign of a quieter week ahead that I can start with a round-up of stories.
OpenAI Faces Lawsuit from Canadian Publishers
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
First, we have a familiar story from the publishing and AI battleground: OpenAI is facing a lawsuit. So much so, it feels like Groundhog Day. This time the legal action comes from Canadian publishers—specifically, Canadian news publishers—who claim OpenAI has made neither payment nor an offer of payment in return for scraping (or, as OpenAI puts it, “using”) their creative output. In response, OpenAI stated that its models are “trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation.”
OpenAI has already signed many deals with publishing companies, which has also been contentious. As an article reproduced by Publishers Weekly from their daily reportage on Frankfurt points out, OpenAI can afford to. Their latest $6 billion raise values the company at $157 billion. Their revenues for this year are projected to be $3.7 billion—approximately three-quarters those of publishing giant Penguin Random House, with no end to the growth in sight.
AI Startups and Persistent Inaccuracy in Journalism
The most interesting—or depressing, depending on your perspective—part of that same article is Thad McIlroy’s observation analyzing a database of publishing industry startups. In the past two years, there have been 320 of them. Almost all are connected in some way to AI.
We end by circling back to journalism and ChatGPT. A new study has found that the platform’s representation of publishers’ material remains alarmingly prone to inaccuracy. That inaccurate tendency seems to bear little relation to whether the source material comes from a publisher with a license agreement or one whose material has been scraped. Color me surprised!
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